Andy Kaufman's Loopy Comedy Coming Back To Life

Nearly 10 years after his death in March 1984, the comedian is once again tickling the country's collective cerebellum, triggering warm memories of his naive, surrealistic charm and loopy genius.

Consider:

* R.E.M.'s latest single, "Man In The Moon," a surreal folk-rock torch song, ponders whether Kaufman is in heaven "goofing on Elvis." The video for the song, playing in seeming perpetuity on MTV, features grainy images of Kaufman wrestling women and impersonating Elvis --pumping his pelvis, attired in a Vegas-era jumpsuit and mutton chop sideburns.

* In a strikingly candid interview with Rolling Stone magazine, man-of-the-hour David Letterman mentioned the R.E.M. song and expressed his abiding respect for Kaufman: "If we could have one guest like Andy -- to me that's worth six months of new material," he says.

* HBO reportedly is interested in producing a film about Kaufman's life. And two book manuscripts that Kaufman wrote -- "God" and the semi-autobiographical "The Huey Williams Story" -- will soon be offered to publishers.

* "I'm From Hollywood," a hilarious 60-minute film chronicling Kaufman's seemingly inexplicable obsession with wrestling, recently has been released on home video by Shanachie Entertainment. Media outlets as diverse as Time and "MTV News" have taken notice.

This is the kind of spontaneous cultural intersection that is almost nonexistent in these times. In an age where every cultural event of the next two years is already penciled into the daily planners of publicists and tax lawyers, Kaufman's re-emergence seems like a godsend.

"It's an amazing coincidence," says Lynn Margulies, Kaufman's girlfriend until his death and the director of "I'm From Hollywood." "But it had to happen. When he was alive, Andy had this cult audience who knew exactly what he was doing. It was like a big secret."

Perhaps best known in his day for his deep-left-field stand-up segments on "Saturday Night Live" and as the strange yet huggable character of Ladka, the shy mechanic of mysterious Eastern European descent who worked in the garage on "Taxi," Kaufman was a potent comedic conceptualist. Considering himself to be more of a performance artist, Kaufman hated working on television, which to him represented a sell-out, according to Margulies.

Eschewing the standards of stand-up comedy protocol, his comedy bordered on the schizophrenic and the absurd. Un like the army of half-witted comedians currently cluttering TV screens and comedy clubs, Kaufman didn't not look like a refugee from "Studs." He would stand onstage seemingly terrified, his face twitching, moments before unleashing his latest brain-rattling bit: singing along to the Mighty Mouse theme, reading lengthy chapters from "The Great Gatsby" long after crowds implored him to get off the stage; or doing a dead-on impersonation of Elvis Presley. (Elvis once told one of Kaufman's producers that Andy did the best Elvis impression The King had ever seen, according to Margulies.)

"Conceptually he was a wild man, but outside of that he was quiet and reserved. He was not a stand-up comedian," says Carol Kerman, Kaufman's younger sister, a homemaker living in the Chicago suburbs.

Kaufman would devise elaborate, visionary concepts that bordered on P.T. Barnum-sized pranks in their scope and oddball appeal. The key to his act was blurring the line between real and unreal; the audience was never certain, by design, whether Kaufman act was a clever routine or an occasionally uncomfortable glimpse at one man's private dementia. Kaufman was the kind of performer that would actually set himself on fire to portray a man on fire.

"He was a fan of Fellini," says younger brother Michael Kaufman, who is now the vice president of finance for a broadcast information retrieval service in New York City. "Andy always said that in his (Fellini's) movies you never knew if you were in a dream. That was Andy."

It was Kaufman's most persistent bit -- Andy Kaufman the Wrestler -- that came closest to tapping into his personal ambitions. It also was his most misunderstood and, in many circles, despised. "He really and truly always wanted to be a wrestler," says Margulies.

Because of his meager physique, Kaufman started out wrestling women -- hundreds of them. He assumed an evil wrestling persona as a sexist, elitist, egotistical celebrity wrestler from Hollywood.

But Kaufman eventually found himself ensnared in a bizarre year-long vendetta with a Memphis wrestler named Jerry Lawler, which is captured in all its shocking and exasperating entirety in "I'm From Hollywood." The Lawler affair eventually spilled over the ropes of the wrestling ring and found Lawler and Kaufman appearing together on "Late Night With David Letterman." The appearance ended with an on-camera brawl and Kaufman hurling a string of obscenities at the camera.